. OLIVER has Simmons with seven home runs, Bill James has him with ten, and the fans are casting the deciding vote with seven. Altuve's projections are all within a homer of seven himself. So far, so good

LeBron James doesn't translate. Baseball will never have a LeBron James. It'll have Mike Trout and Andrelton Simmons and Clayton Kershaw and Craig Kimbrel, and they'll all be good and occupying different

on pretty much every metric.
To help the team's poor defense and struggling run prevention, the Braves are calling up shortstop Andrelton Simmons to replace Pastornicky, who has subsequently been demoted

as Andrelton Simmons enters his third professional season and could be ready for the big leagues next year.
Simmons was the Braves second-round pick in the 2010 draft while Pastornicky was a fifth-rounder

, Andrelton Simmons was among the most productive players in baseball, thanks to his beyond-superlative defense. To the surprise of many, Simmons also slugged 17 home runs, offsetting his struggles to get

to describe pitchers who throw a lot of innings, but not necessarily of high quality. James Shields' innings, at least over the past three seasons, have certainly been of high quality. He has given his

instead of confuse.
In his wonderful book "Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?" Bill James laid out criteria for two measures he invented to evaluate HOF resumes. He devotes Chapter 14 to describing

this off-season - 5x5 rankings come out, and Chad follows with the ottoneu edition. Sure enough, here three cuts of linear weights points rankings of the top 20 hitters for 2013, based on the Bill James

they may yet be the team that comes away with James Shields, who would inject some stability into what is a talented-but-fragile rotation.
Jeff will have more on that signing later, but obviously: Shields